Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 14.djvu/411

* NEPOS. 361 NEPTUNE. not been exercised in the examination ol" authori- tiea, nor is the rehitive iniportauee of things iluly regarded. Until llie middle of the sixteenth cen- tury, those biographies, ou the strength of the titles given in the various manuscripts, were generally ascribed to .Emilius Probus, a writer who lived in the latter part of the fourth cen- tury: but in 15(i'J an edition was put out by the famous Dionj'sius Lambinus, who pronounced the so-called Lives of ^Emilius Probus to be in real- ity the lost work of Cornelius Nepos, De Yiris IlluNlrihiis. There arc many editions, among which nuiy be mentioned those of Van Staveren (Leyden, 1773), of Tz-schucUe (Giittingen, 1804), of Vleckeisen (Leipzig. 1884), of Xipperdey ( 10th ed., Leipzig, 18!)U), of Lindsay (New York, 1895), and of Klagg (New York, 1895). NEP'TUNE (Lat. Neptttnus; connected with Av. iiiijild. moist), or Poseidon (Gk. UixraSuv, Posruli'm. Doric UoTiiSafuv, l'otcidai-On,lloTubS.ii, I'oteidan; of uncertain etymology). In classical mytliology, a brother of Zeu.s and lord of the sea. In legend he is the son of Cronus and Rhea. His home is a splendid palace in the depths of the sea near -Ega?, though which town of this name was meant causeil much dispute. His wife in Hesiod is Amphitrite, and she shared his cult on tlie Istlimus. As a lover he rivals his brother Zeus, and many legends traced local heroes to Poseidon and some nymph or daughter of an early king. So Xeleus and Pelias were sons of Poseidon and Tyro. In his nature Poseidon is always wild and implacable, never becoming a guardian of higher virtues. He i.s the 'shaker of the earth.' a natural conclusion from the fre- quency with which disturbances of the sea ac- company the shocks on land, but he is, above all, the master of the sea, who .sends the dreaded storms, and at his will controls the waves, which are called his swift liorses. His attribute is the trident, or three-pronged harpoon of the .-Egean fisherman, with which he controls the waves, or brings springs from rocks. Closely associated with him is the horse. He was the horse-tamer, was lionorcd with liorse-races at many points, horses were frequently sacrified to him, and there are traces of a belief that he was in the form of a horse. His worship was chiefly conhned to the coast, though he had temples even in the inland country of Arcadia, and it is not at all improbable that he was originally a god of wafer and moisture in general. There is some evidence for a decline in Poseidon worship, which seems rellected in the legends of his contest with Athena for Attica and with Hera for Argos. At Athens lie was worshiped in the Ercchtheum, and it seems clear that both Erechtlieus and .Egeus are in essence the same deity. From him was also named the Attic month Poseideon (about De- cember). He was a great Ionian divinity, and the Panionia were celebrated by the twelve Ionic cities at his sanctuary at Mycale. His temple on the island of Calauria. where Demosthenes died, was in very early times the centre of an amphictyony or league of maritime States. His must famous cult, however, was on the Isthmus of Corinth, where the Isthmlnii Gninrif were cele- brated in his honor. In art Poseidon lias much the same tvpe as Zeus, hut without the dignity and benignity of the latter. Statues of him are by no means common. Two of the best are the Poseidon of Melos. now in .Athens, and tlie fine statue in the Lateran, which many regard as de- rived from the famous bronze by Lysippus on the Isthmus. At Kome the old Italian or Koman water-god, who appears dimly in religious tradition, seems to have been early idi-'ntilicd with Poseidon, and during the historical period Neptune is scarcely distinguishable from the Greek god of the sea, NEPTUNE. The outermost member of the solar system. Its mean distance from the sun is 2,792,000,000 miles; its diameter 34,800 miles; period of revolution about 105 solar years; mass .seventeen times that of the earth ; <lensity one- fifth of the earth's. Thus, it is about eighty-five times larger than the earth, but from its ex- treme remoteness iS of almost inappreciable mag- nitude when seen through an ordinary telescope. Discovery. The discovery of Neptune was an event unique in scientific history. It was the disturbance in the motion of t'ranus. caused by the attractive force of Neptune, which led to its discovery. From 1690 to its discovery as a planet by Herschel, Uranus (q.v.) had been re- peatedly recorded as a fixed stjir. Earlier obser- vations were found not to agree with later observations, and hence it became evident that either the earlier observations were erroneous or that Uranus was wandering from its ancient track. On October 21, 1845. .John Couch Adams (q.v.) communicated to the Royal Astronomer estimates of the elements and position in the heavens of a planet, whose mass would account for the orbital irregularities of Uranus. This did not, however, lead to any search for the planet in the heavens, and "the matter remained buried in obscurity. In the same year the attention of .Jean Joseph Leverrier (q.v.), a teacher of astronomy in the Ecole Poly- technique, was brought to the Uranian ditli- eulty. In two papers communicated to the French Academy, Leverrier proved that only an exterior body could produce the irregularities in the Uranian orbit. In a third paper, sub- mitted August 31, 1840, he had computed the orbit of the supposed planet, the visibility of which he described as that of a star of the eighth magnitude. These results were communicated to Gallc of the Berlin Observatory, with a request to look for the jilanet in the place assigned to it. This Galle did in the evening of September 23d. and perceived a small body with a disk nearly 3" in diameter. The place where it was found was within less than 1° of the spot indicated. Be- fore the news of the discovery reached England, it had already been duplicated. Under the di- rection of Airy, director of the Greenwich Ob- servatory, Chailis of the Cambridge Observatory had commenced a search for the planet July 29th, and recorded 3150 stars, three of which were dilTerent positions of the planet, recorded on August 4th, August 12th, and September 29th. Chailis proceeded to map them, but as he had no good star map this required considerable time, and before this was accomplished, news of the discovery arrived from Berlin on October 1, 1840. Neptune had already been seen by Lalande on the 8th and again on 'the lOtli of 'May, 1795, but was taken to be a fixed star and repeatedly en- tered in the catalogues as such till its discovery as a planet. Neptune is attended by one satellite, which was discovered October 10. 184, bv Lassell. This satellite, like those of T^ranus. differs from the satellites of other planets in the direction of its